


you always build it better the second time

by cyanica



Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [6]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Banter, Blood, Bucky Barnes & Sam Wilson Friendship, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Is a Good Bro, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Captain America Sam Wilson, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, First Aid, Fluff, Frenemies Bucky Barnes & Sam Wilson, Hiding Medical Issues, Holding Hands, Humor, Hurt Sam Wilson, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Light Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Past Riley/Sam Wilson, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Pre-Slash, Pre-The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (TV), Protective Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson Feels, Sam Wilson Needs a Hug, Self-Worth Issues, Whump, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:53:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26949286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: Sam wasn’t really sure what to do with that knowledge – that the ex-assassin sitting in front of him, holding his hand in mental and in flesh, and stitching Sam back together like paper and glue – was someone he also thought as a broken, brilliant beautiful thing that Sam could unravel like twine and string, but – inexplicably, impossibly – he did.Or Bucky is stitching Sam back together after endgame, and there’s banter and feelings and guilt and almost-confessions. And that’s okay; they’ll get there one day.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson
Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947775
Comments: 10
Kudos: 94
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	you always build it better the second time

**Author's Note:**

> because tfatw is the only thing keeping me going in life, and i know that when it releases, i will go down with that ship more than i already have.
> 
> whumptober prompt day 7: i’ve got you, support, enemy to caretaker
> 
> title from ‘build it better’ – aaron wright

“Oh no, no, no! Don’t you dare come at me with a needle and dental floss.” Sam was already shrinking like a complete pansy, he supposed, but the Winter Soldier holding anything remotely sharp was enough to sound the alarms within his head.

“Can you chill?” Bucky sighed, rolling his eyes and Sam just _knew_ he had been spending way too much time with the Wakandan princess to learn such vocabulary. “I know first aid.”

“The _fuck_ you do!” Sam exclaimed, currently bleeding all over Pepper’s nice cottage rug, but the courtesy of keeping his lifeforce from dripping all over her furniture had dissipated somewhat since Bucky Barnes had come at him with a needle and thread (or medical-grade stitches, but the thought of Barnes, of all people, performing any type of procedure on his body was terrifying enough, thank you very much). “You learned that, _when_? In between welding genocidal flamethrowers to torch a country’s cabinet members, or between styling that luscious head of yours every morning?”

Bucky, the fuckhead asshole that he was, had the audacity to smirk, and Sam told himself that the rosiness in his cheeks was from the somewhat painful gash in his forearm, leaking blood over the poor carpet. “You think my hair is luscious, Wilson?”

“Shut up,” was the best comeback he could come up with. No, he wasn’t proud of it.

“C’mon, let me see,” Bucky said with a doe-eyed pout that somehow, inexplicably, _impossibly_ , no one else could pull off like him. The eighth wonder of the universe was indeed James Buchanan Barnes. “Don’t you trust me?”

“You’re shitting me, right? I haven’t trusted you since you ripped the fucking steering wheel from my car.”

“Look, nobody's perfect–"

"That car was a rental, too–"

"So you keep reminding me. Anyway _– you choose_ to hide and lie about your post-alien-apocalypse, _still_ bleeding flesh wound from everyone else–“

“Keyword: _flesh_ wound–"

“–Until you passed out while making us waffles, and now here we are.” Bucky had guided him towards the couch and away from the sticky mess of waffle batter in the kitchen, and Sam bit back the urge to defend said waffle mishap. It wasn't _passing out_ as it was so much as a trip, but Barnes was insufferable _and_ dramatic, Sam supposed. “So, I’m stitching you back together, and you’re gonna shut up and let me, dollface.”

“Call me that again and you won’t _have_ a face,” Sam replied coolly, rivaling his gaze with slitted eyes and a piercing harshness against Bucky’s obnoxiously content one. “I’m gonna shave off all your manly hair while I’m at it, too. Hope you don’t mind Nair in your shampoo.”

Bucky breathed an airy laugh, and the sound made Sam feel warmth spread like blissful wildfire throughout his body, in a very confusing, annoying way, but damningly _familiar_ nonetheless. It was calming and comforting in a strange sort of way, because despite how their dynamic began, it had morphed into something catalytically different, _more –_ perhaps when neither of them had been paying attention within the blissful oblivia of ignorance that was easier than actually talking about it _._

“I’m thinking of cutting it, anyway – like how it used to be.” 

“Yeah, okay I’ll give you that,” Sam mused, thinking of old photographs and history books as Bucky lay Sam’s forearm on his own knee, wiping it with disinfectant and bringing a needle up to the injured flesh. Sam let him. “I’ve been to the Smithsonian before. You weren’t too shabby back in the day.”

Bucky made the first stitch, then another and then another, and with the sweet haze of numbing pain relief and both of Bucky’s warm and metallic hands mending him together, joining him whole, the hurt faded. He felt safe, oddly enough. As fucked-up as the end of the world had been, and how a person that had tried to kill him on multiple occasions, said person was now fixing up his injuries and made his insides feel something he’d thought was gone and dead and cold since Afghanistan.

“Gee, thanks.” Bucky scoffed, and Sam wanted to tell him he would look pretty either way – short hair or long hair, bread or shaven, flesh or metal – but Sam wasn’t quite ready to address what that may mean for _them_. 

So instead he deflected the topic, and maybe Bucky knew that, but he let it go all the same.

“So, really, when _did_ you learn this?”

“Before everything, I suppose.” He shrugged like it was nothing, but over Sam’s time together spent with the anomaly that was Bucky Barnes, he had gotten pretty good at reading between the lines, between the little cracks and indentations that made up Bucky like a mosaic. He was reserved like someone bittersweetly sad, yet upholding a shattering facade that frayed at the seams, uncovering something that could almost be genuineness, _vulnerability_.

Again, Sam wasn’t really sure what to do with that knowledge – that the ex-assassin sitting in front of him, holding his hand in mental and in flesh, and stitching Sam back together like paper and glue – was someone who he also thought as a broken, brilliant beautiful thing that Sam could unravel like twine and string in his gentle hands, but – inexplicably, impossibly – he did. It scared him a little, like the kind of time when he’d loved too hard it had been dangerous; when he’d fallen in love with the love of his life, and then had to watch as the man fell from the sky.

“I was trained in the basics during the war,” Bucky continued, and he had finished dressing the wound with antibiotic cream and gauze, but somehow, neither of his hands had found an excuse to let go of Sam’s. “But growing up with a 90-pound-soaking-wet kid who thought with both his fists as much as he did his heart, being the fixer-upper was kind of a necessity.” 

_And yeah_ , Sam thought, _that sounded right_. There were memories in Sam’s head that were like old fairytale fables and war stories where heroes like Captain America and his best pal Bucky Barnes fought until the guns had all but burned their glorious blaze. They saved one another from the fray as if their lives couldn’t exist without the other, and in the end, had gone down in the snow and ice like their destinies were somehow written in the stars, or perhaps at least the snowflakes.

But there was more to what was told in legends and in history books and war stories. Sam was sitting right in front of it, like he was an imposter who didn't belong in their story.

Bucky was smiling. The corners of his pale lips were turned up in what could almost be a smirk, perhaps thinking of a younger Steve with colourful bruises and his watercolor paintings; his bloodied lips and naive kisses; his bird-bone broken knuckles and an apartment that smelled of art and rosewood and cough syrup –

– while Sam smelled of gunpowder and smoky skies and broken earth. 

That wasn’t right.

“It should have been you.” Sam whispered, feeling like an intruder – undeserving, unworthy of the kind of mantle that would always belong to someone else. He looked purposely down, staring at Bucky’s hands laced within his own and wondered how could one ever possibly live up to the ones that had come before.

“No, Sam.” Bucky told him, simplistically and with a forgiving solidification, like he’d thought this over on a thousand nights and in a thousand different ways, but had always come to the same final conclusion – the _just_ conclusion. “You’re the legacy that needs to carry on, and he _chose_ you to lead it – a good man, a pure heart, a great ass.” He added with a wink, and suddenly Sam wasn’t so much foreboding as he was scoffing to cover up that fact his cheeks were definitely very rosy. 

Bucky settled, etching that sad, bittersweet smile onto his face that made him seem so much smaller than the infamous mass assassin he was supposed to be. It was very human, very grounding and made Sam feel a certain kind of warmth that he hadn’t felt since Riley. 

“I’m not the hero of this story. I can’t save anyone else if I can barely sort my own messes out.” He said naturally, but the words didn’t solidify right in Sam’s mind. Maybe, once upon a time, he had thought the same – _he’s the kind you stop, not the kind you save_ – but everything Bucky Barnes had proved to be beyond the brainwashing and unmaking, was different. 

“I’m not the kind of guy for the history books anymore, or the patriotism, or helping anyone else – let alone the whole damn country.”

_No_ , Sam thought. He was the kind of guy who you made waffles with for dinner, who stitched you up like twine and cotton after the fray, who fought for the salvation of the world with a semiautomatic against an army of apocalyptic, extraterrestrial aliens. 

He was the kind of guy who should be remembered as who he was, not who he became. He was who the world needed, even if they'd never realized it.

“I don’t know,” Sam said, shrugging and running his fingers tips over the flesh and metal of Bucky’s hands, staring at his eyes like he would the stars – like the entirety of the universe. “You fixed me up real nice.” He gave his fingers a little wiggle, wrapping them around Bucky’s flesh as if he needed the excuse.

“Yeah, well.” Bucky huffed lightly. “This wasn’t supposed to be my fight anymore, anyway.” His words made Sam think of Wakanda where he’d overheard the hushed conversation between Bucky and Steve – something about freedom and rest and, oddly enough, goats. He hadn’t meant to listen in to something that could have been so private – didn’t think it was very important at the time – but here in the now, he thinks he might have been.

“You saying you want Steve had?” Sam asked, fingers stilling over Bucky’s knuckles, and holding his hand as if he were scared of letting go because –

– Because he didn’t want to let go, Sam realised, despite it being undeniably selfish of him to want things that were forbidden. After all they’d lost, all they’d sacrificed, he didn’t want to give up _this_ just yet.

“No,” Bucky replied softly, like he was afraid of what might happen should he be selfish as well, and refuse to move on, to drop Sam’s hand. "Not _that_ exactly, but –"

He looked into Sam’s eyes the way Sam had looked into his, basking in the ephemeral serenity until the next moment were to arrive with its new world-ending disasters – 

But right now, they were content. They were alright.

“Right now, I think I’m okay with what’s in front of me.”

They smiled honest, vulnerable little smiles.

“Good,” Sam told him within their ephemeral, little moment of infinity where the world was slow enough for them to catch their breaths and hold on. “Because I don’t think there could be a Captain America without a Bucky Barnes.”


End file.
